Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting

hcdejong writes "The Dutch commission that has been investigating the electoral process presented its final report yesterday (Dutch). The conclusions and recommendations are devastating to the current Dutch practice of voting electronically, and to plans for voting via the internet. Paraphrasing from the report: The deputy minister for the interior Bijleveld said in an initial response (Dutch only) that she would revoke the certification of the current generation of electronic voting machines. The minister plans to present an official Cabinet position on the electoral process in two months. The next elections (for the European Parliament, 2009) may see a return to paper ballots." Read on for a translation of some of the key points from the report.
Paraphrasing from the report:

• The current electronic voting machines do not comply with the basic requirements of an election (e.g. transparency, controllability, integrity).
• The paper ballot still offers the best way to comply with these basic requirements.
• The commission recommends using an electronic system to generate the paper ballot. The voter must be allowed to check the ballot before it is deposited in a locked box.
• Votes can be counted electronically (by scanning the paper ballots), with the option of a manual recount.

Comments

Ireland

[zoney_ie]

We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databases, nonsense like that).

Fortunately this was enough to scupper use of the machines in Ireland (as it was too much effort for the government to try and address even the very lenient concerns of the committee). Unfortunately, we are still storing the machines at a cost of millions of euro a year. Also the politician responsible for the mess got re-elected, cause his own constituency are happy that he's looking out for his area - national e-voting débacle is not in the minds of the locals.

The recommendations of this Dutch committee would be good here in Ireland. There are often spoilt or disputed ballots because we use PR-STV (you number your preferred candidates rather than tick a box). Also counting takes a long time - up to a week including recounts sometimes till the last constituency is declared. So machine filled-out ballot papers and machine counted ballots would be great - especially if manual processing of the ballots is allowed in parallel, or for a certain no. of randomly chosen constituencies, or in any case of a challenge.

But it's not likely the powers that be here would succeed in implementing it. Last time around they nearly ended up not being ready with enough simple partitions for the ordinary bog standard voting!

Re:Unfortunately

[morgan_greywolf]

Not if it has an auditable paper trail. The voter walks to the electronic machine, votes, and then two copies of a reciept, matching what's on the screen, come off a receipt printer. One copy for the voter, one for the election auditors. If the paper count doesn't match the machine count then you have election tampering.

Re:Why

[torkus]

HAHAH...that's hilarious! I actually laughed out loud. I desperately hope this was an attempt at sarcasm that left out the hint.

If you think stock trading has even 1% of the inaccuracy of PAPER VOTING BALLOTS you're delusional. I would know, IAITFAEE (A am IT for an Electronic Exchange). We will never have a bunch of stock trades just 'disappear' like votes can. You will never see a transaction that's not authenticated and tracable from initiation to completion. Ever. We're audited regurlarly. Do you think companies would have trillions of dollars in stock portfolios if it wasn't safe? Our daily volume is in the billions of shares - easily 10's of billions of dollars daily. .0001% inaccuracy would be $1,00,000 "lost" daily. Do you honestly think any "old school" (or new) voting method is 99.9999% accurate?

Remember the horror show they made from the paper punch ballots in bush's rigged election? I actually remember someone coming to the mall by me (in NY) for a school project. They asked people to do a dummy vote and punch the paper in an attempt to prove it was inconsistent and easy to mis-vote.

Credit to "We Don't Trust Voting Computers"

[AlXtreme]

This whole issue wouldn't have existed without thorough research and lots of persistence of the group at "We Don't Trust Voting Computers". These men and women have dived into the voting computers used for decades in the Netherlands, found numerous serious flaws and made them public. They forced our government to install this commission, which has lead to the best possible outcome: no more electronic voting.

Thanks guys, you rock.

Inherently flawed to begin with?

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

...if I were exit polled, I'd deliberately give false answers to poison the data because I believe exit polling is inherently flawed to begin with.

And it's people with attitudes like that which make it "inherently flawed to begin with."